Ryan Alan - On Tocqueville : democracy and America

ALSO BY ALAN RYAN

On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy

On Machiavelli: The Search for Glory

On Politics: A History of Political Thought:
From Herodotus to the Present

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life

Property

Property and Political Theory

J. S. Mill

The Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALAN RYAN was born in London in 1940 and educated at Oxford University, where he taught for many years. He was professor of politics at Princeton University from 1988 to 1996, and warden of New College, Oxford University, and professor of political theory from 1996 until 2009. He is the author of The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, J. S. Mill, Property and Political Theory, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, and On Politics. He is married to Kate Ryan and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

CONTENTS

Copyright 2014, 2012 by Alan Ryan

Portions previously published in On Politics: A History of
Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present

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ON TOCQUEVILLE

T HE DISCUSSION OF TOCQUEVILLE that follows these introductory pages has been taken from a long book, On Politics. In that setting, it was preceded and followed by chapters on particular thinkers and ideas that gave it a context in a longer argument that provided the thread on which the discussions hung. The longer argument was about the possibility of self-government. Can human beings govern themselves, or are they the playthings of fate, or helplessly at the mercy of irrational drives that they neither comprehend nor know how to control? If self-government is possible, how is it to be accomplished? Is the price of a whole societys being self-governing a degree of discipline for the members of that society that makes individual self-government, or individual liberty, always the enemy of collective self-government? Is individual autonomy the enemy of the autonomy of a political community? Spartans prized their political self-government so highly that they would die to the last man to defend it; but individual liberty was nonexistent. Tocqueville is one of several thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who pointed to a paradox in the modern search for freedom. Liberal democracies set out to solve the ancient problem of reconciling individual and collective self-government, but the experience of individuals in democracies is that we do not rule ourselves but find ourselves ruled by everyone else. In emphasizing the role of the tyranny of opinion in a democratic society, Tocqueville introduced a new anxiety to modern social and political thoughtthat each of us would be governed by forces that worked on our psyches rather than our bodies, that political self-government would turn into the management of a flock of industrious animals, not citizens but sheep. The discussion of contemporary democracy in